Relinquishment Trauma

[Gently]

The fact of the violent separation from by biological universe, my habitat, my ecosystem (Birth Mother) 24 to 48 hours after my birth is the originating event of the relational trauma responses that unconsciously shaped my life until I hit an emotional and psychological wall three years ago at age 53.

It had all stopped "working". My life was finally wonderful; there was no external reason for the misery I was living with. I found myself in a personal crisis that took me into therapy and the beginning of recovery from relinquishment trauma, compounded by the emotional neglect/abuse of my emotionally and relationally dysfunctional adoptive parents, and the multi-modal abuse of my first husband.

I asked Kizzie about starting a sub for adoptees, as I have found that there is something about that early, pre-verbal trauma that is formative and unique to the tone of the other traumas that I am processing.

So, this is a place for those of us who feel the need to connect on the subject of adoption and/or fostering.

For me, it is a big part of the relational pain I experience today with my adoptive mother who is failing in health, in the hospital, and whom I have not seen in several months. It's a big part of the relational confusion I have felt my whole life.

Thank you, Kizzie, for creating this sub and for creating and facilitating this forum.

[NarcKiddo]

I was not adopted, but I know various people who were. In most cases their adoptive parents were only too glad to have them and were loving. But one girl I went to school with seemed initially to have been lucky but then the wheels fell off during her mid teens. I have a large collection of heart-wrenching letters she wrote to me during the school holidays (we boarded) when she was stuck at home in this fearful environment. I myself was of course a teen living with a dysfunctional FOO (though I did not recognise it as such back then) but I remember feeling desperately sad that she had been separated from her birth mother only to end up with this.

I am very sorry to learn that you were taken on by dysfunctional adoptive parents. It's just awful.